Welcome!

Introductions

About Me

Dad Joke

  • Why did the nearsighted man fall in the well?
  • He couldn’t see that well!

The Class

Goals

  • Learn basic programming
  • Be able to collect and visualize data from the web
  • Present computational research
  • Read and evaluate computational social science research

Programming provides exciting opportunities for social scientists

  • Digital data is exploding and programming is required to do research at scale
  • Algorithms mediate more and more interactions and understanding programming can help us to analyze them
  • Computational methods let us do new things
    • NLP
    • Simulation
    • Large-scale experiments

About the class

  • It’s going to be intense! :)
  • But we can do it!
  • 10 AM - Recorded lecture
  • 11 AM - Co-working / office hours
  • OH by appointment

Day-to-day

  • Coding Challenges
  • Readings

Final Project

  • I’m compiling some example projects
  • Whatever is most valuable for you
    • Jupyter notebook
    • Methods + result section of paper
    • Replication

Project Milestones

  • Final project
    • Really quickly identify a dataset and general plan
    • Project planning doc
    • Project presentation + report

Resources

Wiki

  • Schedule
  • Links to readings

Brightspace

  • Readings
  • Discussion board
    • Upload a video
    • Discussion
  • Example Projects

Piazza

  • Post questions and help each other
  • Daily random assignments as “answerer”
    • Starting with tomorrow’s HW

Anaconda / Jupyter Intro